Are systems used for "scientific number-crunching" really applicable in this case? While some departments may have those on a separate network, not connected to the internet at large, I have never heard of a system employed for research tasks being completely air gapped. Otherwise, accessing and working on data would be prohibitively harder. Would such a trade-off be worth the potential gains by deactivating mitigations?
Also, may I ask why you dislike Phoronix? I personally enjoy their articles and the benchmark suite they have developed seems very well-rounded and transparent. I wouldn't count the statement concerning the ~50% increase in time it takes to complete a certain task on 4.20 as clickbait, considering it was never used in the linked articles title to hock readers and gain clicks.
Honestly, I have yet to see a large and popular enough use-case that allows for a both completely air gapped system, whilst also heavily benefiting from disabling mitigation to such an extent, that an admin couldn't just lock up the flags required. If I, as an admin, made the conscious choice of going so far as to disable these patches, I would also want to at least re-read whether this is truly significantly advantageous, rather than copying a line from a website with no context or further information on the current state and impact on performance.
It'd be nice to be able to easily boot into, or toggle into, a performance optimized, disabled mitigations environment to do something while offline.. many computer uses don't require being connected to other computers. I've gotten into the habit of hotplugging my Ethernet connection, personally.
You can actually do that fairly easily, just add the parameters linked to a second boot entry in GRUB.
However, I would very much not advise doing so, as I still am unaware of any task that can both, be done without the need for a network connection, while also being significantly slowed down by the mitigations, after recent improvements to the kernel and software. Basically, the potential benefit is very low in a lot of tasks, whilst requiring additional security measures (ideally fully air-gapped) and that you reboot the system every time you'd do such a task.
Also note that, in theory, just being temporarily offline may not shield from being exploited fully.
As an example (the only case that I've identified personally), if your curious, I have a (windows; Intel q6600) box that I use for gaming occasionally. Single player game I like, Total War: Shogun 2, runs at about 55 fps (benchmark) pre-Meltdown/Spectre/etc. Now it gets ~22 fps. I can use https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm to toggle some mitigations to get it playable again.
It will be interesting to see, how his management style is going to impact Red Hat over the coming years. Considering his background and acumen, I feel like there is going to be a stronger focus on tailored services and specific solutions for organizations. They are already very active in the health care and financial industry, so this could be an area they might expand.
A lot of IBM products are in the cloud and the focus from Whitehurst as IBM president is that cloud, containers/K8s/RHOSP, and edge are the big things that will be going on. It will be very interesting to see how RH plays into the broader IBM strategy. Will RH become the platform and IBM becomes tooling, services, and products on top of that platform? Or will RH move to more consultancy and enterprise IT services? Coming from Cisco where the acquired company always gets folded into the mothership, I find it very interesting to see IBM's stance of keeping RH alone and mostly separate. At least for now...
its very possible and widely touted that it could go the other way, in that Red Hat takes over IBM (culturally. Red Hat certainly has a strong enough culture to do that.
I very much agree, we have to be cautious with our optimism.
Concerning the approach, this study looked into a fairly new form of rTMS, namely iTBS. Here is paper detailing how it differs from 10Hz rTMS, with a specific focus on potential cost savings: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6742475/
We certainly need more data on iTBS effectiveness and I hope that a properly controlled, double-blind study can yield some information on whether this is actually effective on a larger scale and in the long term. A sample size of 21 is simply to small to make any judgement on that.
This new form of rTMS appears to have truly incredible potential to help people whose depression is otherwise resistant to treatment, which is sorely needed.
Having over 85% of participants meet remission criteria is, to put it mildly, incredible, though with only 21 participants, sample size is too small to make conclusions regarding large scale effectiveness.
As the paper notes, we now need double-blind trials. I very much hope that this treatment will be able to help people on a larger scale.
These incredible numbers will almost certainly drop in larger trials and once more medication resistant participants are included in a study. ECT is comparable to the efficacy of this small scale trial, but their novel approach and increased dosage could yield a major improvement to TMS.
Placebo effects can play merry hell with depression, and even moreso when the patient is treated with fancy technology that has a noticeable side-effect.
I am guessing you are talking about git, in which case, the closest you can do by itself is to tag the specific branch:
git tag -m '<name> is deprecated' deprecated/<name> <name>
git branch -D <name>
This removes the branch <name> from the branch list and would cause the specified message to appear. You may also revive the branch, if you ever felt inclined to do so.
An effective and simple way to make a positive difference under these circumstances can be, to just address the topic with those around you. There is a lot of confusion, misinformation and concern going around that in my experience, is quite often simply the result of people not being able to digest the massive amount of information currently being presented.
Having a good grip on what is factually accurate, especially online, is hard enough, when ones lives aren't dominated by a novel virus. If you find the time to clear up a few misunderstandings, whilst also teaching, how one can stay informed about the current situation and how to handle it, that alone can make a great impact.
I get that Discord has some appeal considering the current situation. Aside from the price, there are some clear advantages over Zoom, Slack and others, though I would very much discourage the use of Discord for companies or public institutions.
It also lacks any first-party support for E2E and does not offer any extended support you might require if you want to roll out a solution at this point in time.
Lastly, Discord's UI is very much tailored to their target audience, gamers, and while some of it may be easily ignored, the rather prominent dedicated "Games" Tab and in jokey quotes (Do a barrel roll, the cake is a lie, etc.) may not be received positively by ones superiors.
> Lastly, Discord's UI is very much tailored to their target audience, gamers
We've been using Discord to talk to each other while playing board games with a group of 4. I've noticed I have a harder time hearing female voices through it - the sound seems to cut out quite randomly, so that the women in the group tend to have repeat themselves.. I'm not sure if this is anecdotal, but after this experience, and knowing how dependent voice recognition is on extant training datasets, I would think twice before trying to use it for business.
Also, may I ask why you dislike Phoronix? I personally enjoy their articles and the benchmark suite they have developed seems very well-rounded and transparent. I wouldn't count the statement concerning the ~50% increase in time it takes to complete a certain task on 4.20 as clickbait, considering it was never used in the linked articles title to hock readers and gain clicks.
Honestly, I have yet to see a large and popular enough use-case that allows for a both completely air gapped system, whilst also heavily benefiting from disabling mitigation to such an extent, that an admin couldn't just lock up the flags required. If I, as an admin, made the conscious choice of going so far as to disable these patches, I would also want to at least re-read whether this is truly significantly advantageous, rather than copying a line from a website with no context or further information on the current state and impact on performance.